The standard of living of garment workers in Cambodia : its determinants and workers' perception

Since the mid 1990s, the rapid growing garment factories around Phnom Penh city have provided many employment opportunities for young female women from the rural areas. Previous researches confirmed that the workers who left their rural work to take up new jobs in the garment factory could earn higher wages than their previous work. Moreover, part of their earnings from the garment work was used to improve their family’s standard of living who was residing in the countryside. Yet these studies have only partly covered the actual workers’ standard of living. Due to the lack of current studies that considered this issue in any detail, this research attempts to study the workers’ daily living activities and their perceptions toward standard of living. The research also aims to figure out the important factors that mostly affect the workers’ standard of living and discuss how these indicators could be improved. The significance of the thesis compared to other research works is that it deeply discusses the main basic living requirements of the garment workers in Cambodia including food, health, housing, utilities, health, and transportation. Another important characteristic of this research is to uncover the opinions of the workers toward their standard of living and reveal their difficulties in daily life. The first and foremost finding in this research confirmed that there are four important indicators should be taken into account when studying the Cambodian garment workers’ standard of living. They are food, housing, utilities and health respectively. According to the workers perception Transportation and Education is less important for their daily life. Moreover, security is another part of the concern for most garment workers. Second, to improve the workers’ standard of living, there is a need of government policy intervention and strict enforcement. For example, having canteen at the factory is suggested to improve the workers’ food quality. The workers insist to having a canteen at the factory while the employers want to escape from this responsibility. Having limited overtime is another suggestion for improving the workers’ health condition; however, in most cases, both employers and employees agree to go beyond the limit. Finally, workers perceived that they don’t have a good standard of living or their standard of living is lower than the expectation. This finding could be taken as one of the indicators to evaluate the threats of the industry.